Chapter 31: The Ogind Invitation
Personal System Calendar: Year 00012, Day 15-28, Month VI: The Imperium
Imperial Calendar: Year 6857, 15th to 28th day of the 6th Month
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The Gahoot
Most things that entered Maya Village's territorial airspace without introduction did not have a good morning.
The three juveniles who intercepted the creature had been patrolling the northern boundary at altitude, doing what Aetherwing's grandchildren did when left to their own devices at that age, which was roughly what any large, powerful, apex predator does when unsupervised: look for something to bother. The bird they found was unlike anything in the local beast taxonomy they had seen so far. Seven feet tall at rest, with a wingspan of at least twenty-two feet, it was a size the juveniles could respect even by their own generous standards, moving through the late afternoon sky with the particular quality of something that did not want to be noticed and was very nearly succeeding.
Very nearly.
One of the three juveniles, to its eternal credit, had the presence of mind to stop the other two before the situation resolved itself in the way that juvenile apex predators tend to resolve uncertain situations. The creature had markings. A crest harness. Insignia on its chest binding that any bird with half a brain could identify as belonging to something official. The juvenile that noticed this communicated the information to its siblings with the urgency of someone who had just realized they were about to do something their uncle would not be pleased about.
The other two, who had been about forty seconds from doing something irreversible, reconsidered.
They circled the newcomer instead, three enormous young eagles boxing in one very stressed royal messenger bird at a height above the treeline, waiting with the awkward patience of children who have been told to wait but do not fully understand why waiting is better than the other option.
Finnester found them before they got any more bored.
August was in the council session when the mental impression came through, not words exactly, more the specific quality of attention that his bonded eagle used when something required his eyes rather than just a verbal relay. He excused himself, mounted up, and was at the scene within minutes.
The Gahoot was, in his professional estimation, holding itself together admirably under the circumstances. It had clearly clocked Finnester's size and made the rational assessment that this was the authority figure in the vicinity and that cooperation was the appropriate response. It was hovering in place, maintaining altitude, with the body language of something that had completed a very long journey from the north and would appreciate being taken seriously by someone who outranked the three creatures currently staring at it.
August looked at the crest. He had spent enough time in Ogind's commercial and political orbit to recognize the royal insignia without having to think about it.
He pulled a cut of beast meat from his inventory for each of the juveniles. They accepted this with the enthusiasm of creatures who understood that being rewarded meant they had done the right thing, even if the right thing had involved a significant amount of not doing the wrong thing instead. Finnester communicated the landing instruction to the Gahoot with the directness of someone who outweighs you by several hundred kilograms and is being polite about it.
They descended together.
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The Message
The village's landing area for large avian creatures was in the north-eastern sector, a cleared space that some of the newer Mighty Peregrine Eagles used when arriving or departing in a way that did not involve the dramatic vertical drops they preferred for show. The Gahoot touched down with the conserved elegance of a creature that had been flying for the better part of two days and was rationing its remaining dignity.
August dismounted, approached carefully, and fed the bird directly from his hand. It was hungry enough to accept this without ceremony. While it ate, he removed the message cylinder from the banding on its left leg, checked the seals, and read.
The first letter was formal. The second was not quite informal, but it carried the specific weight of a king who had something important to say and was making sure it landed.
He read both. Then he read them again, which he almost never did.
The first letter was a diplomatic invitation. King Armeides Ogind the Forty-Fifth was extending formal acknowledgment of Maya Village's role in the Kirka liberation and proposing a meeting between his son, the crown prince, and the village representatives. The location proposed was Kirka Village itself, on the reasonable grounds that it sat as a middle ground between both parties. The timing was after summer's end. The tone was the measured courtesy of a monarch who knew he was reaching toward someone operating outside the usual frameworks of petitioner and receiver.
The second letter was a warning.
The criminals responsible for the road harassment were not independent. They were affiliated with an organization called the Blood Martyrs, and the Blood Martyrs had a patron. That patron was the Sovereignty of Arwen. Ogind's investigators had confirmed this through the interrogation of captured operatives from Kirka. The purge of embedded agents was already underway on Ogind's end, but the reach of Arwen's network into the region around Maya Village was another matter entirely, and the king thought the village leadership should know exactly what they were dealing with before they dealt with it.
August sat with this for a moment.
A kingdom was behind these recent incidents. Not a syndicate with delusions, not an opportunistic criminal organization testing new territory. A kingdom that had existed for three thousand years, that had been fighting its northern neighbor for most of that time, and that had decided Maya Village was a piece on the board worth moving against.
He stood up, patted the Gahoot once on the neck in the way that works on most birds and this one tolerated with moderate grace, and walked directly to the council chambers.
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The Council's Reaction
The session was still running when he returned. He placed the letters in front of Chief Red without preamble and waited.
Red read the first letter with the careful attention of a man who had learned that official communications from royalty contained at least three things the words said and one thing they did not. He read the second letter with a different expression entirely. Then he passed both to the elder on his left, and they moved around the table.
The first to break the silence was Elder Donnel Archer, the master bowman who had spent more years than most people had been alive tracking things through dangerous terrain and had developed opinions about threats accordingly.
"These bastards," he said, with the precision of someone selecting exactly the right word, "they have been harassing merchants coming to our village, even attacked our merchants and some of our guests. The people we invited, who came in good faith, and who were threatened on the road because some fat king two borders away decided our village was inconvenient to his plans." He looked around the table. "Is that the context of the message?"
"That is the substance of it, Elder," Marcus said from his financial desk.
"Then the answer is yes, we should send a reply to the Kingdom of Ogind, we should accept this meeting they have proposed, and we will have to deal with anyone who is behind this continued harassment." Donnel settled back. "In that order. Or simultaneously, I am not particular."
Manford Ned, refugee representative and a man who had rebuilt his life here from nothing and understood better than most what it cost to lose what you had built, took a more measured approach. "We should focus on the meeting with the First Prince first. We should know what the Kingdom of Ogind wants before we commit further resources to a conflict that may yet be resolved diplomatically against Arwen. The crown prince reaching out to us is a signal that they see value in our strategic position between their kingdom and that of Arwen. We are neutral in this matter, though if I think about it as a former citizen of Arwenian territory, the king of Arwen most likely took offense at our role in the Kirka liberation. That is what this harassment is all about. It is not some random spur of the moment decision."
"And what of the harassment in the meantime?" asked Elder Anvel Ironhide from across the table.
"Have Commander August handle it. I am sure there are already measures in place to counter this unprovoked aggression against a neutral party. Am I right, Commander?" Donnel said, glancing across the table.
Red, who had been listening with his chin resting on one hand in the way he did when he was letting everyone say what they needed to say before saying what was going to happen, set both letters flat on the table.
"We will officially reply to the king. We will accept their invitation — we lose nothing in learning what they have in mind, and if it goes well, a closer relationship with the Kingdom of Ogind puts some balancing weight against Arwen's aggression. And we are already trading with two of their major cities and throughout their principality. We are not starting from nothing." He looked at August. "And Commander August, the council formally authorizes you to take whatever measures are necessary to protect our trade routes and the people using them. Non-lethal is the preferred practice of course — it shows that we have enough restraint and wisdom to not kill everything on sight. Unless, of course, a more lethal response becomes necessary. Is that clear?"
"Yes. I have already assigned Team Mandibles with exactly that in mind," August said.
"Elder Donnel, your anger toward this new threat is understandable and it is not wrong. But we show restraint for as long as it remains an option, and we will have to do this correctly, or we will have more in our plate than we could chew. We should not give Arwen a grievance they can use to justify anything further." Red picked up the letters. "Let us dismiss today's meeting and I will draft our reply to the kingdom personally. August, you have the rest."
The session ended and the drafting of the message and the defensive plans began.
---
The War Room
The barracks command center was a room that had been built for exactly this kind of meeting: functional, without ceremony, the kind of space where you could spread maps on the table and say things that would make polite company uncomfortable.
August had called the relevant people. Jonathan Ross, Commander of the Militia Force, who stood to his left. He wore the expression of a man running a scenario through his head — not one that had actually happened to his family, but the kind of quiet exercise he did from time to time, putting himself in the position of those who had been harassed on the roads so that his decisions would carry the weight of understanding rather than abstraction. Axel Martin was to his right with the stillness of the Settlement Security Division commander who had already been running quiet threat assessments and was glad to have confirmation of what he had suspected. Commander Sandeval, who ran the Guard Escort Division and whose people were the ones accompanying the village's trade wagons that had been stopped by ruffians on the road a couple of times, was present and not particularly calm about it. Commander Ragnar Martin of Team Mandibles attended through the party chat connection, his physical presence remains absent but his attention was clearly there — the rest of the room knew he was listening. Elder-Chief Tamba represented the Kotoko warriors. Tammali, the Lokoroko combat commander, sat across from him with the practical patience of someone who had been waiting for the fighting to start for several weeks. Captain Hendrick of the imperial garrison was the last to sit, which he did with the expression of a man who understood he was attending as a courtesy and that the decisions made here were not his to influence.
August laid out the situation without embellishment.
The Sovereignty of Arwen was behind the harassment. The Blood Martyrs were the instrument used to hire the criminals. The operations on the road were reconnaissance and suppression, designed to discourage trade and make the village look less stable to potential allies while Arwen's network assessed whether stronger action was viable. The current harassment was not the threat. It was the test preceding the threat.
"The imperial garrison's mandate covers only the extent of our territory," August continued, nodding to Hendrick. "Beyond that, we should handle our own affairs if we wish to continue this path of opening up to the world. Sir Hendrick I am informing you of the current situation because you deserve to know what is operating in the region near your post, and because any escalation that reaches our walls will require strong coordination between the village and your forces. But do not worry, we will handle any external operation that is ours to handle."
Hendrick nodded. He had known this and was not troubled by it. Maya Village's clarity about jurisdictional lines was one of the things that made working alongside them straightforward.
The ground rules for Team Mandibles were formalized in the room: intercept and neutralize hostile actors on the trade routes, arrest where possible and practical, use lethal force only when lives were genuinely at risk, and leave enough runners to carry word back to whoever was directing the operation that this was not a soft target. That last point was deliberate. They wanted a strong message to be delivered. Not shouted, not documented in a way that created diplomatic incidents. It must be carried back on the lips of whoever was frightened enough to run.
"Show them what kind of beast they are trying to poke," August said. "Make it personal enough that they feel it and that even those only watching can feel it — that a sleeping tiger is still a tiger. But do not make it political enough that they can use it against us. Ragnar, you have discretion on field implementation. You know your team."
The second discussion was the contingency that nobody wanted to have but everyone was having anyway: what if the Sovereignty of Arwen escalated beyond their use of state sponsored criminal proxies and their soldiers came instead.
There was only one proper response to that, and it was that they would be ready for them.
The plan that emerged from the next two hours was not something that the public should know about and it most definitely was not shared with their visitors. What was shown publicly instead was exactly already there on the surface of the village — namely its walls, its guard numbers, the imperial garrison, the obvious fortifications. Any spy reporting on Maya Village's capabilities would report what they were meant to report: a frontier settlement with creditable defenses, imperial backing, and a combat-capable population. A respectable settlement that could fight back even when threatened whether it be the beasts of the forest or an army of greedy humans. And anyone who ever thinks of assaulting it would pay a dear cost of their entire nation's army.
What they would never reveal to the public was sensitive information that could be easily hidden and already if need be, they could undersell the true value of any information beyond what was already known. To name a few of these well guarded secrets, is that there were currently two grandmasters in the village, technically three if you account for August, all though he isn't part of their established circle yet. The fact that they also have a solid alliance with almost a company size in military terms of semi-domesticated Grimfangs and that they also have a full flight of thirty-five Mighty Peregrine Eagles whose aerial assault capability had no equivalent anywhere in the surrounding region. They also have Benethar and his own army of magma constructs that are currently being carefully tested away from any prying eyes. They also didn't reveal any information regarding their well trained militia, that looking from the standards of the outside world it would surely embarrass most standing armies. Because none of these things are needed to be known to the outside world, they would only know the full extent of this when it was already too late.
"Let them see what they want to see and hear what they want to hear," August said. "Tell them a bit of truth and a bit of misdirection. We will ensure that no one who wishes to harm Maya Village can ever truly grasp our real capabilities. Not until we choose to show them."
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The Highway
Two days before the council session occurred, Team Mandibles had already been working hard on preventing such occurrences to even properly manifest.
They had established a forward base of operations on the southern approach; it was properly tucked away from any approaching traffic in a concealed vantage point; it was hidden at a sufficient elevation to observe all approaching traffic on the main imperial highway without being visible to those moving along it below.
And although they lacked the capabilities of aerial reconnaissance that talon one has, they have Torin's Grimfang Toto to cover them in that approach the beast ranged the tree line on a circuit that covered the blind spots no human eye could reach from the high ground. The combination of their elevated observation and ground-level scent tracking meant that very little moved on that stretch of road without the team knowing about it before it arrived at a certain point.
The targets they were looking for were not hard to identify once you knew what to look for. They weren't looking at the merchants, nor the traveling families, nor the ordinary traffic of people moving between places for ordinary reasons. They were looking out for the criminal actors sent by the Blood Martyrs, who moved in a certain way that people move when they are trying to look like something they are not and have not quite mastered the performance. They have noted from earlier reports of encounters near the village that they usually come in small groups, usually three to five. They move lightly and their cargo is visible, it was most likely used for any quick escapes from the law. What gave them away were their probing questions at the roadside rest stops rather than conducting any legitimate business with their peers. They also watched the passing merchant caravans with the professional attention of people who are likely counting the escort guards.
These last few days the team had dealt with three of such groups, this was in the days before the council was informed of the larger picture as to the identities of these people and who was supporting them in the shadows.
The team had worn masks August had provided, adorned with carvings of different beasts — more feral than the Blurred Devil's own beastly face, something that looked like the forest itself had grown a mouth and decided to use it. The masks offered two purposes: it denied people to be able to easily identify whoever was on the receiving end, and second the mask like August's own wasn't only a defensive item but it also had a special feature, they gave off a passive skill that has something to do with fear, a fear that worked on something even older than reason itself. Meanwhile their worn armor beneath moved without announcing itself. The materials came from whatever August had access to at that time, well to be precise it was crafted through his Personal System, which remained something the team had quietly stopped asking about because the answers were never satisfying and the results were consistently excellent.
The first group of the captured outlaws had been given a choice to either spill what they knew or they would lose their lives. But as we all know, they chose the latter, they made the wrong choice, and with that two of them were buried in the forest. The third member they had let go so that he may spread the word of the presence of demons in the imperial highway. That was the intended outcome of course.
The second group had been a bit smarter than the first and had surrendered before anything became permanent. They were stripped of their identifying materials, given a very clear description of what would happen the next time they or anyone associated with them was found on this stretch of road, and they were sent back south on foot without their horses. August preferred them alive and frightened over being dead and silent. Fear, if properly administered, was a more efficient message than a grave that only produced resentment in the people who dug it.
The third group made the additional mistake of having someone among them who decided that fighting back was the right move. That decision upgraded the encounter from a simple interception to something that produced two more graves and one individual with a very detailed understanding of exactly how wrong his assessment had been, who was also sent running south on foot.
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Benethar
Among the members of Team Mandibles operating on that road, the one that the criminal operatives reacted to most viscerally was not Ragnar, who was objectively the most physically imposing person present. It was also not Freya, whose particular brand of competence expressed itself in ways that experienced fighters recognized as genuinely dangerous. Rather it was Benethar.
This was partly because of the appearance he was born with — large, red, and carrying the ambient heat of something that should not exist in the shape it occupied. Master Ben's magnum opus was not subtle. It was a living magma construct with a soul of its own, a being whose creation had required the kind of commitment that a grandmaster-level mage could only conduct once in a lifetime, well only as far as one had the proper resources to even begin with its conception.
Benethar moved through the world with the quality of someone that does not feel the need to apologize for what he is. The heat that radiated off from him was a gentle reminder that he is a being that could decimate his enemies but was also a great asset to those he called friends.
But the larger part of what makes him terrifying was the behavioral aspect. Criminals, as a professional demographic, were accustomed to dealing with humans, and humans had specific patterns. Humans felt pity, or hesitation, or the particular vulnerability of being connected to people and things they did not want to lose. Benethar had none of these leverage points, not because he lacked emotional capacity — in fact he had developed considerable emotional range in the years since his awakening — but because his emotional architecture was entirely his own, built from principles without the accumulated anxieties and sentimental attachments that made humans negotiable and, better yet, easily manipulated into thinking in a particular way. It made him the most intimidating in every word or sense of it.
He was not cruel. That would have been simpler to understand. But he was rational, in the specific way that a being is rational when it has no history of being otherwise, and he was honest about the outcomes in a manner that the people on the receiving end consistently found more disturbing than any idle threats would have been.
He had told the second group, in the same register he used for everything, that they would be released and that if they returned and caused the same trouble, he would ensure they did not need to be released a second time. He said this with the earnest directness of someone stating a fact rather than issuing an empty threat. The effect on their willingness to cooperate had been immediate and comprehensive.
He was now three or so years old, in the sense that counted for a being like him. In those three years he had learned what he was, what he valued, what his team meant to him, and what his limits looked like. The limits were his own and he had set them himself, which was how Master Ben had always intended it. If he ever found himself moving toward something wrong, he trusted the people around him to tell him so, and he trusted himself to listen.
It was, he had concluded, a reasonable arrangement. Though most humans seemed to have considerably more difficulty with it.
---
The Village's Official Response
Three days later after the Gahoot's arrival, it had now left the vicinity of the village and was now heading north toward the Kingdom of Ogind.
Red's reply was attached to the right leg banding with the care appropriate to a document that would be read by a king. It accepted the invitation. It proposed conditions for the meeting that were reasonable and reciprocal: a limited retinue on both sides, Kirka Village as agreed, the timing was to be confirmed once the harvest season's demands on the village's administrative schedule were known. It expressed gratitude for the intelligence regarding Arwen's involvement, noted that the village had already begun taking appropriate measures, and extended an invitation for Baron Kirka to serve as the village's communication intermediary for all further correspondence until the formal meeting could be arranged.
The tone throughout was the tone Red used when he meant everything he said and wanted the reader to know it: warm, direct, with the specific gravity of a person carrying something worth protecting who was not confused about what it would cost him to be able to keep it.
The Gahoot departed at dawn, moving north toward the mountains and beyond them toward the Kingdom of Ogind, flying with the easy confidence of something that knew its route home and had no further questions about the journey. Below it, Maya Village was already moving through its morning — the training groups on their circuits, the smoke from the forge district rising against the pale sky, the market stalls opening in the first light.
It was still a long way from its home towards the kingdom that had sent the message.
And much further still from the kingdom that had decided, somewhere in a lavish dining hall surrounded by men who kept their heads by keeping their opinions well-timed, that this village was worth the trouble of subterfuge.
They had miscalculated the cost.
Team Mandibles was already on the road, securing the approaches from the south. The council had spoken with the willingness to do what was necessary even against a much larger, older, and stronger territory than their own. August had a plan he had not needed to share with anyone who did not need to know it, and a village behind him that had been ready for something like this since long before most kingdoms had thought to look in their direction.
Whatever was coming from the south, it would find something dangerous waiting for it in the wilderness of the north. Something with very sharp fangs that was not afraid to use them.